Matthias Koenig

Religiosity and gender equality : comparing natives and Muslim migrants in Germany

Abstract In European public debates, Islam is often described as an impediment to gender equality. By using data from surveys conducted in Germany, we analyse the role of high levels of individual religiosity in explaining Turks’ and Germans’ approval of gender equality and the way Turkish and German couples share household tasks. Results suggest that, for both groups, individuals with strong religious commitments are less likely than secular individuals to hold egalitarian gender role attitudes. At the behavioural level, this correlation between religiosity and gender egalitarianism only holds true for Turkish respondents. Furthermore, strong religious commitments contribute to generational stability in attitudinal and behavioural gender-traditionalism among Turks. However, when explaining Germans’ more egalitarian gender-related attitudes and behaviours, religiosity turns out to be just one factor among others – and not a particularly important one. Further research is needed to disentangle the different cultural and religious aspects of Muslim migrants’ attitudes and behaviours.

Europeanising the Governance of Religious Diversity: An Institutionalist Account of Muslim Struggles for Public Recognition

Recent comparative social science research has emphasised that different patterns of incorporating Muslim migrant minorities are related to institutional varieties of religious governance in Western European countries. This article focuses on the emergence of institutional elements of religious governance at the European level and their impact on the organisational and symbolic incorporation of Muslims. Drawing on conceptual tools from institutional theories in sociology, it is argued that the emergence of highly differentiated institutional domains of law, politics and identity at the European level has resulted in the convergence of basic legal principles of religious governance as well as in the persistence of divergent national patterns of incorporating religious minorities. These contradictory trends explain specific features of contemporary Muslim migrants’ struggles for public recognition.

Incorporating Muslim migrants in western nation states – a comparison of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany

This article analyses how nation states respond to religious diversity produced by migration. Drawing on research results from a comparative macro-sociological study on the incorporation of Muslims in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, it is argued that both the claims of recognition and the modes of symbolic and organizational incorporation are shaped by varying institutional arrangements of political organization, collective identity, and religion. Yet recent convergences in the development of multicultural forms of incorporation and the inclusion of religion as a legitimate category of identity in the public sphere suggest that these institutional arrangements are equally transformed under the influence of transnational discourses of human rights.

Religiosität türkischer Migranten im Generationenverlauf : Ein Befund und einige Erklärungsversuche

Zusammenfassung Die Religiosität türkischer Einwanderer zeichnet sich durch eine erstaunlich hohe intergenerationale Stabilität aus. Dieser Beitrag diskutiert existierende theoretische Erklärungsansätze für Religiosität im Generationenverlauf und überprüft sie anhand empirischer Daten der in Deutschland durchgeführten Generations- and Gender Surveys (GGS). Dabei wird gezeigt, dass die klassische Assimilationstheorie und Konzepte der symbolischen oder kompensatorischen Religiosität ebenso wenig eine befriedigende Erklärung dieses Phänomens bieten wie der Hinweis auf die allgemein hohe Wertestabilität in Migrantenfamilien. Weder nimmt die Religiosität zwischen erster und zweiter Generation ab, noch erfährt sie einen Bedeutungswandel hin zu einer primär symbolischen Dimension der Lebensführung. Auch finden sich nur schwache empirische Evidenzen für die Thesen, dass intensive Religiosität eine Domäne der gesellschaftlichen „Verlierer“ ist oder lediglich einen Spezialfall einer generell hohen intergenerationalen Wertestabilität im Migrationskontext darstellt. Abschließend werden daher makrosoziologische Erklärungsansätze entfaltet, die muslimische Religiosität auf die Diversifizierung des islamisch-religiösen Feldes und auf die Salienz von Religion als symbolischer Grenze gegenüber Einwanderern beziehen. Summary Intergenerational stability of the religiosity of Turkish migrants is surprisingly high. In this article, several theoretical explanations for the maintenance of religiosity from generation to generation are presented and tested empirically against data from the German Generations- and Gender Surveys. We can show that classical versions of assimilation theories, concepts of symbolic religiosity, of religiosity as a compensation for a lack of social status, or of a high intergenerational stability of values in general cannot fully explain this phenomenon. Religiosity does not decline between the first and the second generation, nor does it become more symbolic in character. Furthermore, empirical evidence yields only limited support for the hypothesis that high levels of individual religiosity can only be found among structurally and socially less assimilated segments of the immigrant population. The same holds true for the argument that they just reflect generally high intergenerational value stability among immigrants. Concequently, in the final section we discuss the role of contextual factors in explaining intergenerational stability in migrants’ religiosity such as an increasing diversity of the religious Islamic field or the salience religion as a symbolic boundary marker between natives and migrants.

Bridges and Barriers: Religion and Immigrant Occupational Attainment across Integration Contexts

This article advances knowledge about context-dependent impacts of religion on immigrant structural integration. Drawing on theories of inter-generational immigrant integration, it identifies and spells out two context-dependent mechanisms through which religion impinges upon structural integration — as ethnic marker prompting exclusion and discrimination, or as social organization providing access to tangible resources. The propositions are empirically tested with nationally representative data on occupational attainment in three different integration contexts which vary in religious boundary configurations and religious field characteristics — the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Using data from the US General Social Survey, the Canadian Ethnic Diversity Survey, and the European Social Survey, the article analyzes indirect and direct effects of religious affiliation and participation on occupational attainment among first and second generation immigrants. The analyses find only limited evidence for the assumption that in contexts with strong religious boundaries (such as Western Europe and, to a lesser extent, Canada), immigrants face religious penalties in structural integration. By contrast, the analyses support the assumption that in contexts with a thriving religious field (such as the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada), religious attendance tends to be positively related to occupational attainment, especially for the second generation. For the first time, the article empirically tests arguments about transatlantic differences in the role of religion for immigrant structural integration, and it suggests ways of better integrating micro-oriented survey research with macro-oriented institutional analysis.

Institutional Change in the World Polity International Human Rights and the Construction of Collective Identities

This article discusses the transformation of the classical nation-state, as articulated in contemporary struggles for recognition. Elaborating neoinstitutional world polity theory, it analyses global institutional changes that underlie those transformations. It is claimed that the worldwide diffusion of the classical nation-state model itself has had paradoxical consequences, which have in the long run generated a new model of multicultural citizenship, legitimating the decoupling of state membership, individual rights and national identity. The argument is based on empirical evidence from a semantic analysis of international legal discourse on human rights, particularly in the field of religion. Documentary sources suggest that the content of human rights has changed in the second half of the 20th century; the close link between human rights and national self-determination was superseded by the idea that the protection of human rights requires states to recognize a diversity of primordial or traditional identity groups.

Conflict in the world polity - neo-institutional perspectives

This article assesses the potential contribution of neo-institutional world polity theory to the study of global conflict dynamics. Prevalent conflict theories explain the emergence and resolution of conflicts by resorting to actors’ mutually incompatible preferences and differential access to economic, social or symbolic sources of power. World polity theory challenges fundamental assumptions of such theories by conceptualizing action as highly scripted and actors as culturally constituted. By focusing on the cultural rules of modern actorhood, world polity theory accounts for the emergence of new motives of conflict no less than for the diffusion of ‘rational’ methods of conflict resolution. It concludes by arguing that theoretical explication and empirical analysis of the hitherto neglected conflictive dimensions of the world polity approach is a fruitful agenda for conflict research and neoinstitutional scholars alike.

Explaining the Muslim employment gap in Western Europe: Individual-level effects and ethno-religious penalties

It is well-documented that Muslims experience economic disadvantages in Western European labor markets. However, few studies comprehensively test individual-level explanations for the Muslim employment gap. Using data from the European Social Survey, this research note briefly examines the role of individual-level differences between Muslims and non-Muslims in mediating employment differences. Results reveal that human capital, migration background, religiosity, cultural values, and perceptions of discrimination jointly account for about 40% of the employment variance between Muslims and non-Muslims. Model specifications for first- and second-generation Muslim immigrants reveal a similar pattern, with migration background and perceived discrimination being of key relevance in mediating employment difference. While individual-level effects are indeed relevant, unexplained variance suggests that symbolic boundaries against Islam may still translate into tangible ethno-religious penalties.

Social Conditions for the Implementation of Linguistic Human Rights Through Multicultural Policies: The Case of the Kyrgyz Republic

This paper begins with a survey of various theories of nationalism and the function of language in its constructs. The resurgence of nationalist projects in the last part of the 20th century is set within the context of globalisation which is seen as intensifying and encouraging the desire for a recognition of ethnic specificity. Within the successor states of the USSR, ethnic revivalist and nationalist tendencies threaten the transition to democracy. Data from Kyrgyzstan show how the Kyrgyz government is faced with the dilemma of correlating the need to respond to the desires of ethno-nationalists, the need to promote the institutional structures of a common public sphere and the need to act democratically in response to linguistic diversity. Linguistic rights enshrined in international law are proposed as the structure within which governments should act. Assimilationist and differentialist solutions are rejected in favour of a multicultural approach. The territorial model of multiculturalism as applied...

Religion and new immigrants' labor market entry in Western Europe

This paper analyzes the effects of religious participation upon a major socio-economic integration outcome, namely employment, among recent Christian and Muslim newcomers in three Western European destination countries: Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. The paper revisits theoretical arguments about religious participation as an ethnic investment strategy or, alternatively, as a bridge to the societal mainstream. Drawing on the longitudinal dataset produced in the international survey project on ‘Socio-cultural Integration Processes among New Immigrants in Europe’ (SCIP), the paper puts these arguments to a rigorous test by analyzing effects of involvement in religious communities on employment and by scrutinizing channeling effects of the ethnic composition of religious congregations for recent migrants’ entry into mainstream versus ethnic niche economies. The paper finds only limited support for either of the two arguments, suggesting that religious participation is structurally decoupled from socio-economic integration. However, persisting net employment gaps between recent Christian and Muslim immigrants might indicate the existence of religiously marked and socio-economically consequential boundaries in Western Europe.